In last line of defence, if you ask me how to simply all of this, make a form where there's percentage option for each graphics, sound, gameplay and else then calculated final score for them. But this is really bad idea.

Your rankings have a Pearson rank correlation coefficient of 0.60, which is the highest of any pairing of judges but not fantastically high. In terms of individual judges vs community, Appel is at 0.69, followed by you at 0.67. Overall, though, the combined judges' ranking vs the community ranking has a PRCC of 0.73.

I love how this makes absolutely no sense to me

I don't understand even a single thing on what he said maybe it's statistic term?

In last line of defence, if you ask me how to simply all of this, make a form where there's percentage option for each graphics, sound, gameplay and else then calculated final score for them. But this is really bad idea.

Your rankings have a Pearson rank correlation coefficient of 0.60, which is the highest of any pairing of judges but not fantastically high. In terms of individual judges vs community, Appel is at 0.69, followed by you at 0.67. Overall, though, the combined judges' ranking vs the community ranking has a PRCC of 0.73.

I love how this makes absolutely no sense to me

I don't understand even a single thing on what he said maybe it's statistic term?

From Wikipedia. Essentially, he's saying that there's a close relationship between the scores different people gave to the same games.

The novel The Little Prince tells the story of a boy who travels from planet to planet, meeting different silly adults ( although no Java programmer if I remember it well ). He finally arrives to Earth where he meets the story's narrator.

I hadn't noticed the link, but now I find it quite obvious.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote Le Petit Prince!!!! I can't believe I didn't notice that!

I also got The Little Prince reference. Read it in French class in high school.

As for future options:

I would also do away with percentages, but not replacing them with bins. Instead, I'd rather just sort the games in the order I like them. That way there is a clear winner and loser - boom, done. It might feel a little dirtier (I didn't want to make this game get third to last place!) but honestly since it's a contest I think it makes more sense. I should be aware of exactly how I'm ranking the games, and the judge form already sorts them for you every time you update them just for this reason. So the percentages are already just an unneeded proxy for ordering by winners. Similarly as an entrant I'd rather see "1st with this judge, 6th with this, etc." rather than having to figure it out myself.

The only potential advantage I see to percentages is that you theoretically compare the games against some gold standard you have in your head, rather than against each other – which is what I did. In other words, my lowest game was only 45% because I see a 0% as a total piece of dog shit that crashes repeatedly and could hardly be called a game. A 50%, on the other hand, is not really very fun and is pretty uninteresting, but it runs and it's a game of some kind. a 100% is close to the best thing I've ever played and I couldn't imagine how it could be improved (I gave no 100%'s either, and never have in the 3 Java4k's I've judged).

But personally I would rather compare games against each other. It frees me from needing to have some sort of golden standards in my brain, and I almost always end up with like 6 88% games for some reason. Of course, doing this would probably require some kind of drag and drop interface to make it all easier - why not code up some cool jquery javascriptyness?

Indeed I felt like The Little Scientist might be a good start for a real game... If I find the time maybe I'll start making a mobile app out of it, who knows

If you go through all the winning games in the past java4k contests, then you'll realize all of them have one thing in common, the potential of being a full game. 4k is great for prototyping games, and as a judge what I love the most is seeing potential, my imagination takes off and I have all sorts of ideas for the game.

That's exactly what I use the Java4k for. Apologies to the judges for boring them with car games every year! Their reviews along with the community results are invaluable information. So a big thanks to all!

Although a NATO soldier may know what the 'M' may stand for it's not true for anyone else who isn't a NATO soldier. Icon design is difficult, because it's difficult to find the right symbol design to describe exactly what it does and is easily understood by anyone who isn't familiar with the context. Sometimes it's easier just to spell things out. Some 4k games abbreviated some options using just one character, which really made it impossible to play because you had to read the instructions text to understand what each character stood for. Programmers often forget that ordinary people are supposed to use the interface and they've never seen it before.

Yes, documentation for my game was too sparse. I was told earlier, and then again by the judges. Will think more about that if I get something done for 2013.

It wasn't a programmer thing in this case, only that I am too familiar with the genre (also didn't think it would be a problem to figure out which unit was the engineer, thinking that the symbol would be interpreted as a bridge anyway). There wasn't really any research involved, so I can't take credit for coming up with something "clever" either.

This was a problem I had when playing some of the other games too. It's a difficult balance to make documentation that includes everything but is not so overwhelming as to scare the player away.

What I could suggest is for 4k game makers to test the UI on one or two persons before releasing. Stand next to them and tell them to try out the game, and then just watch them, note down what you see they're having difficulty with. Also, tell them to describe to you what they're doing while they're doing it, what they're thinking about doing and if they're having problem with. Shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to do this, and you'll squash over 90% of usability issues. You can do this at school or work, or even home.

Btw. the bridge icon thingy wasn't at all a big issue for me, beause even though it wasn't easily understood I could deductively realize it was the bridge because no other icons were the bridge, and other icons were readable.

Yes, documentation for my game was too sparse. I was told earlier, and then again by the judges. Will think more about that if I get something done for 2013.

It wasn't a programmer thing in this case, only that I am too familiar with the genre (also didn't think it would be a problem to figure out which unit was the engineer, thinking that the symbol would be interpreted as a bridge anyway). There wasn't really any research involved, so I can't take credit for coming up with something "clever" either.

This was a problem I had when playing some of the other games too. It's a difficult balance to make documentation that includes everything but is not so overwhelming as to scare the player away.

I was pretty sure I encountered a bug because I had absolutely all my units still alive and none of them would build a bridge of any kind. But I could be wrong.

Yea, sorry about the site. I got a new fiber connection on friday and they apparently forgot to give me a static ip. But I've already requisitioned them for a new static ip so the site should hopefully be up today or tomorrow. Would have been up earlier, but May 1st is a national day-off here.

Yea, sorry about the site. I got a new fiber connection on friday and they apparently forgot to give me a static ip. But I've already requisitioned them for a new static ip so the site should hopefully be up today or tomorrow. Would have been up earlier, but May 1st is a national day-off here.

If your router supports it, you could use DynDNS and then use that as your www cname. But then the A host would still not work :/

Yea, sorry about the site. I got a new fiber connection on friday and they apparently forgot to give me a static ip. But I've already requisitioned them for a new static ip so the site should hopefully be up today or tomorrow. Would have been up earlier, but May 1st is a national day-off here.

Great, thanks for the update, and thanks for going through the effort :-)

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